Chris Stamm's weekly punk rock column.
I’ll buy anything Portland’s mighty Dirtnap Records puts out, no questions asked. They’ve become, in the last few years, the 21st century answer to Lookout Records, at least in my house. That Dirtnap arm, like the jaunty Lookout logotype of yore, is all I need to see before the cash is on the counter. In honor of Dirtnap’s revamped retail/distro ...
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Want to raise your historical awareness while napping? Watch Amigo.

Movie Reviews & Stories
John Sayles’ career is a maddeningly
prismatic thing. So varied is the ambidextrous writer-director’s list of
accomplishments that James Franco, following an ill-advised perusal of
Sayles’ Wi
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Sadly, there was no "Gus van Sandwich."

Longtime WW contributor Chris Stamm broke our hearts and moved to Seattle a few months ago. We asked him to give us his assessment of the Emerald City's version of PDX cuisine. Feel free to leave your own 5 Spot taste test notes in the comments.

I guess I should have written about Arctic Flowers’ Reveries LP a few weeks ago, before the first pressing sold out, but I’m not here to abet collectors. Nope, I’m here to blather at you about amazing things you should be listening to, and I aim to do this blathering in a fri...
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Singing in the sauna.

Movie Reviews & Stories
I have seen Steam of Life twice now, but it was
only after going over my notes from both viewings that I realized just
how frequently the dread specter of death noses into the proceedings.
I’d li
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I was, of course, too young to understand nostalgia as a neophyte punk know-it-all and hate-it-all-or-most-of-it-anyway, too green (sometimes literally) to get why anyone would pay to see punk legends of yore. We’re talking 1995-98 here. I remember Agent Orange and Angry Samoans seemed to play in the Bay Area monthly, and I liked “Bloodstains” and Inside My Brain as much as the next geeky, j...
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Due to congenital antipathies toward mandals, public bowel evacuation and unleashed children, I do not attend many outdoor music festivals. Pictures of Coachella crowds make me queasy. You say “Bonnaroo” and I think skin cancer, Dave Matthews-brand giardia and mist tents spiked with patchouli-scented pesticides that temporarily transmute one’s brain into a Ben Harper-loving sponge. This...
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Party at ground zero, baby, movie starring you...and some dead pigs.

Music Stories
[APOCALYPSE PUNK] “We have no problems singing songs that are not nice at all.”
That’s Retox lead screamer Justin Pearson approximately 15 seconds into the brutal 12-minute LP Ugly Animals, whi
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As someone who regularly invites spells of melancholy into his fetid office-cum-vomitorium so that the plangent strains of Leonard Cohen or Elliott Smith might more swiftly sever his most vital psychic veins—as one of those sad flagellants for whom a mood is an excuse for a soundtrack, I mean—I have long longed for extreme (loud, punk, metal, noise, whatever) music that suits my particular bra...
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